


ghosts (all wayward gryffindors come home eventually)

by jemmasimmns (laurellance)



Series: reflections (a harry potter fanfiction collection) [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Peter Pettigrew Centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2016-07-29
Packaged: 2018-07-27 11:55:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7617115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurellance/pseuds/jemmasimmns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter Pettigrew in the Second Wizarding War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ghosts (all wayward gryffindors come home eventually)

**Author's Note:**

> There's a brief description that's a tad explicit near the end. Just thought I'd put that out there.

There's an adage Peter remembers veterans say in passing by. Dulce et Decorum Est pro patria mori, and he remembers it always being said bitterly. In anger, although he looks back now and he can't tell if it's anger at himself, or anger at everyone else for not knowing better. 

He thinks they have a point. He didn't really understand them when he was younger, and he remembers asking in confusion. A small child, asking for answers bitterly earned. And they'd answer, with a shake and a nod and a sigh and "you'll understand when you're older."

He's thirty-eight now, nearly forty. He thinks he understands it now, and he smiles bittersweet and ambiguous as they had. 

(Sometimes he whispers advice to Draco Malfoy. Not enough to warrant anything, but small tips. Words of adages of lessons hard learned, scavenged from dead bodies and what remained. Stolen from the lips of dead men, a bitterness he finds all to familiar. 

He wants to tell Malfoy something else: that some things, some people, are worth dying for. Keep them, he wants to tell him so desperately, but the words never come out because their story isn't one to share to Draco Malfoy.)

* * *

Sometimes Peter thinks insomnia is a blessing. Sometimes, it isn't. Most of the time, the memories choke him.

He remembers them, crisp and sharp and clear as the day they had occurred. Loud and in shining colours, a desperate obsolete patch of joy that kills when it is meant to bring joy. 

It's a fitting punishment, he figures. To have the curse of remembering them as if no time had passed, as if they weren't already dead and rotting for years. 

He drinks, drinks because he has nothing else to give. Nothing else worth fighting for.

* * *

 

He remembers the hope the doughboys had brought, the small smile the fifty year old veterans would give as they described the trenches. He thinks he gets it now, understands how they could smile at something so gruesome, so horrible, because at least it was familiar. It was easy, it was something they could adapt to. 

There's an unspoken implication that settling back afterwards is always worse, and he thinks it's true. They all do, to a degree. Because fear is what has compelled them to His side once more, and he knows it as well as they do. 

It's a bit like a dance now, a lowly prayer they go for. Some unspoken bond that they hope will keep them alive, something that will make them worth remembering. 

(They would be known for their infamy, their cruelty.)

* * *

 

The thing is, he thinks if Walden Macnair said he didn't care about blood purity anymore, he thinks they would all act as it it was normal. Perhaps that was a lie: Lucius Malfoy was the one exception to the rule, his son Draco close to agreeing to them. 

No one talks about the frayed nerves, the dark circles around their eyes, the wild look their eyes would get after a particularly bad hunt the night before. 

It wasn't that they mourned the ones they killed, they'd didn't. They just took it as a body count and moved on, and that was that.

* * *

 

(He knows something is wrong with Rookwood tells him he had slept for thirteen hours without stop. 

The mansion is just as tension filled as ever, all attendants stressed as they always were. Something feels off now, and he knows this feeling better than he knows himself. Better than he knows goodbye, self hatred and betrayal. 

It's indication something is going to happen, something important.)

* * *

 

It's Harry, it's Harry, it's as they had dubbed him "the boy who refuses to die", the same one he cleaned nappies of, the same one he remembers with the vivid clarity of his sepia stained memories, the one that smiled too rarely and the one who doesn't have Lily and James. 

He's kept in the cellar with Ollivanders and the Luna girl Ginny Weasley adored. There's Ron and Hermione (of course) and that is that. 

He takes an unhealthy amount of dreamless sleep that night, knowing well his body could never process it efficiently, it leaving him sluggy and slow. 

(He still wakes up from nightmares at 2AM.)

* * *

 

He remembers something one of the Prewett Twins had said one day, in fourth year: that all gryffindors would come home eventually, and he thinks to himself all the Prewett twins got in the end was a burial close to no one attended because everyone was tired of burials and everyone was tired of the endless numbers of body that were yet to buried.

He grabs the curtains, pulls them off, and lays them on the middle of the bed in a intricate mess. They're stacked hazardously, each side threatening to fall off. 

He sleeps, not as a human but a animal.

* * *

 

(a confession: everytime he sees or hears wormtail, he can only think of Him saying it, in a mocking and disregarding tone as if the He couldn't immediately know that wormtail was what they had called him, when they were still friends. 

he thinks prewett was right about him now, when he had called him a heartless dictator. 

fuck. they all do, he thinks, to a degree. 

everything about lord voldemort is about asserting his power to follow through on his crusade to achieve the lie of purity.)

* * *

 

He hesitates for one split second, allowing them to apparate away in the brief second he had neglected to get them. 

He dies, throat crushed in and eyes nudging out as he struggled to breathe. He dies, and somehow things are better. 

Maybe Prewett was right when he said all Gryffindors come home eventually.

* * *

 

He never does tell Draco Malfoy about the Marauders, but he figures that story is his, for better or for worst. It is his guilt, his burden, and a tie of his past he will never be able to let go of. 

Besides. The boy would learn that lesson on his own eventually, and he knows he would do better than all of them. Greater things, probably. 

(The memories are untinged now, and it's slightly better than he remembers them as. They still choke him in shame and regret.)

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr @ staliahs.


End file.
